In 2004, Georgia State University (GSU) Library's Southern Labor Archives, located in Atlanta, began working with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) to plan for the digitization of the union's 105-year-old journal. With generous financial support from IAM, the authors, who are GSU staff members, began…

Silverplatter's Electronic Reference Library (ERL) provides wide area network access to its databases using TCP/IP communications and client-server architecture. ERL has two main components: The ERL clients (retrieval interface) and the ERL server (search engines). ERL clients provide patrons with seamless access to multiple databases on multiple…

Working in a cooperative team environment across libraries and job classifications, librarians and support staff at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) have mounted several successful web projects, including two versions of the Libraries' home page, a virtual reference collection, and Science Library "ANTswer Machine." UCI's…

For the purposes of this digest, productivity is defined as ways in which library and information services can assist agencies, industries, and individuals in producing goods and services effectively and profitably. Two fundamental issues that affect productivity are access and control; two major strategies for improving productivity are…

This report presents statistics on how Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries spend money on electronic resources. This report indicates that expenditures for electronic resources account for 19.6%, on average, of ARL institutions' library materials budgets. ARL libraries reported spending more than $171 million on electronic…

This paper addresses online classroom and electronic library issues which include the myriad of technical difficulties encountered, along with physical and intellectual property rights. It also makes a statistical comparison of two proportions of Internet access between city and rural schools. An inescapable time lag between the introduction of…

The creation and application of a multimedia digital library to support learning and teaching in the performing arts is described. PATRON (Performing Arts Teaching Resources Online) delivers audio, video, music scores, dance notation, and theater scripts to the desktop via an innovative Web-based interface. Digital objects are linked subjectively…

This annual report of the Digital Library Federation describes projects initiated in response to the following program priorities: (1) focus attention on libraries of materials that are born digital, including a social science data workshop and guides to quality in visual resource imaging; (2) integrate digital materials into the fabric of…

The Making of America (MoA) Testbed Project, coordinated by the Digital Library Federation, is a multi-phase endeavor. Its purpose is to investigate important issues in the creation of an integrated but distributed digital library of archival materials (i.e., digitized surrogates of primary source materials found in archives and special…

This paper describes a realization approach to evaluate the best fitting service provider in the context of "The Digital Beethoven House" pilot project, involving the digitizing of a composer-referred collection of colored manuscripts and other sources at the Beethoven House Association (Germany). Practical hints for museums are provided…

This paper describes work that has been in progress on the use of information and communications technology in the transformation of teaching and learning in several subjects in the School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Its specific focus is on the "Virtual Print Room" project.…

An educational digital environment that will provide appropriate methods and techniques for the support and enhancement of the educational and learning process is a valuable tool for both educators and learners. In the context of such a mission, the educational tool SL-EDGE (Student Library-Educational DiGital Environment) has been developed. The…

This paper describes how SDLIP and STARTS, two complementary protocols for searching over distributed document collections, were combined. The resulting protocol, called SDARTS, is simple yet expressible enough to enable building sophisticated metasearch engines. SDARTS can be viewed as an instantiation of SDLIP with metasearch-specific elements…

The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University has created a multi-terabyte digital video library consisting of thousands of hours of video, segmented into over 50,000 stories, or documents. Since Informedia's inception in 1994, numerous interfaces have been developed and tested for accessing this library, including work on multimedia…

This report presents the results of a survey of Digital Library Federation members that examined the kinds of assessments they were conducting, what they did with the results, and what worked well or not so well. The first section of the report is an introduction that describes the report structure and summarizes challenges in assessment. The…